Books about revolutionary love, radical self-love, and self-care. (Okay, there's a theme here.)
See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love by Valarie Kaur
This book is a challenging and breathtaking call to love others, opponents, and ourselves in ways that transforms the world. The author tells her story of growing up as a Sikh American in rural California, navigating romance and identity, documenting post-9/11 hate crimes during her grad school days, organizing and protesting war, being subjected to police brutality, handling immigration cases while attending law school, learning to care for herself in illness, becoming a mother, and finding reconciliation in unexpected places.
Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of revolutionary love as she has come to define it, expressed in verbs: wonder, grieve, fight, rage, listen, reimagine, breathe, push, transition. She avoids easy answers of all kinds, painting a picture of the incredibly difficult but necessary way forward. It's inspiring, challenging, uplifting, and painful at the same time.
Something that really struck me about this book was gaining her perspective as a Sihk on 9/11— the string of hate crimes against anyone who looked remotely Muslim, the huge impact on Sikh men who wear turbans as an expression of faith, the way that whole communities of people became so afraid of being shot that they didn't have any space to grieve the horrible events of that day. Her personal connection to that pain, and how she navigated her identity as both an American and a Sikh, was particularly powerful.
I highly recommend this book to anyone. Its call to love— not cheap, fake-unity, emotions-based love, but true, deep, courageous love— is necessary now more than ever.
The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
I'd heard this book recommended several different times, so I decided to pick it up, and I'm so glad I did. The title makes it sound like just another self-help book, but it's far more revolutionary than this. Taylor presses us to understand that radical self-love is the seed that helps transform culture, politics, and systems of oppression. (You may be noticing a theme in the books I've read the past couple weeks…)
The basic premise of the book is that societies— through cultural norms, political policies, media representations, and a thousand other factors— create hierarchies of bodies, and then police or punish bodies that step out of line. She calls this "body terrorism," discussing the very real implications of living with these ideas pressing in from the outside and our own thoughts.
"Body terrorism is a hideous tower whose primary support beams is the belief that there is a hierarchy of bodies," she writes. "We uphold the system by internalizing this hierarchy and using it to situate our own value and worth in the world. When our personal value is dependent on the lesser value of other bodies, radical self-love is unachievable."
The chapters touch on many different ways that bodies are implicitly or explicitly excluded: for being too fat, too Black or brown, too queer, too old, too disabled, too neurodivergent, too unhealthy, etc. Along the way, she affirms the importance and inherent worth of all bodies, and how we can come to celebrate diverse bodies instead of trying to fit them into a hierarchy. It's an incredibly important book which I recommend to everyone.
Take Care of Your Type: An Enneagram Guide to Self-Care by Christina S. Wilcox
This book is a light read with suggestions for self-care, and care you can give to others, based on Enneagram type. It's a bit fluffy, but has some good ideas, especially since I need encouragement to take care of myself in ways that are actually meaningful. It's a nice book to read before bedtime (unlike the above books, which will keep you up at night!).
What have you been reading lately?
Previously on What I've Been Reading:
All What I've Been Reading posts
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